When I was 14, I was asked what I would want as my epitaph. The best I could come up with, after a few minutes of serious thought, was "It seemed like a good idea at the time." Twenty years later, that's still the best I can explain about why I do anything.

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Thursday, April 10, 2008

More weirdness.

So this morning I parked my truck, noted the ghetto sled w/Earnhardt plate, went in to class and posted the previous entry. After class I told my friend about the car. He's also about to graduate law school, and he's a Christian rocker / band manager. He's got ear spacers, and his main crisis right now is having to take them out and look "normal." Anyway, I described the ghetto sled and he said, mysteriously, "Nascar fans are everywhere."

Maybe he watches race cars go around in circles on TV. Who woulda thought.

Anyway (Yes, I say that all the time and I probably should've named the blog "Anyway..."), my friend was telling me a story about her horse from years ago. He was "being ridden into mud that came up to his belly and he got stuck. I'm not sure how they got him out, but he hasn't been a huge fan of mud since." That reminded me of another Weird Redneck Story.

Jessica (I'd call her J, but I've got too many other J's in my Redneck Chronicles already, and I'm not organized enough to think up individual nicknames and keep track of them) had seven horses. One of them was a *really* fucked up padded stud, Power.* I mean, she'd jacked with his feet so bad that he couldn't walk normally much less gait. His rear pasterns would buckle with every fourth stride. I'm serious, he was constantly stumbling on his back legs. Before I started boarding, in the summer of '06 or '07, she took Power on a trail ride. In his pads.

You can't take a padded horse trail riding. You just CANNOT. If your padded horse walks through the mud there is a very real chance that he'll get stuck, and if he gets stuck and tries to pull his legs out he might YANK THE HOOF CAPSULE OFF. Padded classes at local horse shows are cancelled if the arena's at all wet, because this has happened too often.

Jessica went trail riding on her padded stud anyway. Just to prove that he's tougher than we think (1st alternate runner-up name: "Tougher than we think"), Power did not pull his hooves off in the mud. He sank instead. Power sank up to his stomach in some mud near the soybean field. Jessica jumped off before she sank with him and waited for him to yank himself out of the mud, then got back on and rode home. She hasn't, afaik, taken Power on a trail ride since then. Of course, she hardly rides him because he's a real dick of a stallion and she can't really handle him, but that's par for the course.

*Jessica, as far as I know, never deliberately hurt her horses. He was one of those "clean" padded horses, not a sored one. But she always got the cheapest padded farrier she could find, and she hardly ever rode Power. When she did, it was a full on cheap english saddle, gojo-on-the-legs, chains-on-all-fours SHOW. The cheap farriers kept doing weird things to his hoof angles and he ended up really high-heeled in the rear. I think. It's pretty hard to look at a padded horse and evaluate the hoof angles; they're all such slipper-toed Frankensteins in the front that it's hard to look at the rear feet objectively. Anyway - either from the (atypical) chains on the back legs or from the weird angles on the back hooves, Power gaited worse than any TWH I've ever seen, and he stumbled all the time. When he wasn't stumbling, he was hollering at other horses or trying to rear. Poor crazy stud.

I know my attitude toward other peoples' horses seems cold. I had to accept, really early on, that I could not save all the horses I saw. It's a hard moral choice, and I still wither on the inside when I see "mistreated" horses, but I cannot save them. It's like... if you really loved cats and really thought declawing was inhumane, but your friends were all getting cats and kittens and having them declawed. Do you alienate everybody around you by ranting about how declawing is evil? You can't rescue all those cats. Your friends cut their cats' toes off, yet they're taking adequate care of the cats - aren't the friends' cats better off than the scrawny disease-ridden stray cats you see? Yeah, I know people who sore their gaited horses. I know people who "just" pad their gaited horses. But those horses are adequately provided for, and they're not sold to the killers for $200. I save what I can save (Silky, Quinn) and I try to lead by example, and that's all I can do.

1 comment:

I am so in love with your blog! I have been trying to go back and read it from the beginning but i DO have a job i'm supposed to be doing . . . :-) But keep up the good work! I don't know anything about gaited horses so this is all rather refreshing. If you want to read about my draft mare and former PMU baby, she has a blog at http://rockinroxie.blogspot.com.